Last December the Jazz legend Milt Hinton died at the age of 90. Milt Hinton led a fabulous life. He was a superb, pioneering jazz bassist who played on more records than anyone else ever did or probably ever will - at least 600, maybe 1000 different recordings, maybe more.

But that wasn't all, and that's my point. For a half century Milt Hinton was also, on the side, a serious photographer. His hundreds of images of the people he knew and played with make up a beautiful, intimate documentary chronicle of the jazz pantheon of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Pictures that only Milt Hinton could make.

I find that I have a special affection and admiration for successful artists with the daredevil energy to leap into new realms that they have no business leaping into, artists with the combination of ambition and talent and heart to try a second or third career instead of just coasting along in one.

I'm not talking here about the new celebrity cottage industry in children's books, where people famous from television and film get to call themselves authors by putting their names on very thin books with lots of pictures. For a movie star to publish a children's book involves no danger of overreaching, no risk of major failure.

And risk of major failure is what anything important -- any project that aspires even to the vicinity of art -- requires.

Julian Schnabel became rich and famous as a painter in the 1980s, repeatedly taking big artistic risks. He glued broken crockery to giant canvases. His arrogance was often insufferable. And he failed regularly - but failed a lot of the time in interesting, ambitious ways. Schnabel is now a movie director as well as a painter. And bully for his I-can-do-anything hubris. Because his first film, based on the life and death of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, was charming.

And his second film, "Before Night Falls," based on the life of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, opened earlier this year, and it's a luscious, stunning piece of work.

Or take Steve Martin. Like a lot of comedians, he turned himself into a movie actor, and like a lot of actors, he then became a movie director. But like no other actor-director I know about, Steve Martin is also an accomplished playwright and, now, with Shopgirl, a bestselling novelist. OK, novella-ist, but whatever, it's still a hugely impressive show of discipline and ambition and breadth.

When people like Steve Martin or Milt Hilton move from one realm to another, each craft can enrich and color the next and then the next.

What do we call this M.O. that I'm celebrating? Multi-tasking? Dabbling? Dilettantism? The amateur spirit on steroids? Renaissance man? "Renaissance man" seems like a quaint, corny phrase. But maybe that's because in this age of credentials and specialization, our language has become biased against the remarkable people with the audacity to do more than one thing well.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.